Historically the billing process has been a three party process. More particularly, the typical billing process consists of billers, such as merchants, utility companies, service providers and bankcard companies, preparing hardcopy paper bills either directly or through an independent bill preparation service provider. The bills normally consist of detailed billing information relating to the goods or services purchased or ordered, including a detailed itemization of the billed charges. The billing information also includes the total charge, due date for payment and, in many cases, the minimum amount which must be paid by the due date.
The hardcopy billing information relating to each individual biller is then placed in a separate envelope and mailed through the postal service to the applicable payor. The envelope may also be stuffed with other materials such as other product offerings, e.g., special discounts or new goods or services. Hence, each payor has historically received billing information from each biller as an individual hardcopy piece of correspondence received by mail.
Most, although not all, billers bill on a periodic basis, such as each calendar month or every thirty days. However, although billers may issue bills covering similar periods of time, e.g., thirty day periods, individual billers may have billing cycles and bill issue dates which vary. For example, some monthly billers may have a billing period which extends from the fifteenth of one month to the fifteenth of the next month, while other billers may have a monthly billing period which extends from the last day of one month to the last day of the following month. Further, even if different billers bill charges incurred over identical periods, the issue dates of the bills can vary widely. Accordingly, payors typically receive bills at various times throughout, for example, any given calendar month.
To complete the billing process individual payors have historically made payments directly to each individual biller by hardcopy paper check drawn against a financial institution and mailed via the postal service to the biller's remittance center. A returnable portion of the billing information received from the biller is typically returned with the check. The biller must then present the check for payment through the payor's financial institution before the payment funds can be actually received by the biller and applied against the payors account.
Systems have been implemented to allow payors to pay bills electronically. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,383,113 which is assigned to the assignee of the present application, discloses a system for electronic payment of bills received by individual payors from various billers. Recent improvements have been made in electronic bill payment systems, such as those disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/994,047 entitled An Electronic Bill Payment System with Merchant Identification, filed on Dec. 19, 1997 and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/010,193, entitled Dual Source Remittance Processing, filed on Jan. 21, 1998, both of which are also assigned to the assignee of the present application and are incorporated herein by reference. Such systems allow the payor, using a home or office computing device, e.g. a personal computer, to access a centralized payment station, e.g. a server, via a network. Based upon the payor's authorization, the centralized station can access funds in the payor's checking account at a financial institution to pay various billers in accordance with payment instructions received from the payor via the network. The payments may be made either by electronic funds transfer or by hardcopy paper check to the individual billers.
Although advances in electronic bill payment systems have significantly automated remittance processing, these systems have not eliminated the need for payors to continue to receive large numbers of hardcopy paper bills from individual billers. Hence, bill presentment has remained a tedious and expensive task both in terms of the preparation and the distribution of billing information.
Recently, a centralized bill presentation system has been proposed. As proposed, billing information is forwarded to a centralized system by multiple billers. The received billing information is accumulated over some prespecified period of time corresponding to a billing cycle and then forwarded in a single transmission to the applicable payors. Although the proposed system could result in some reduction in the cost of distributing bills, it has numerous disadvantages.
For example, since the proposed system transmits billing information to an individual payor only after bills from different billers have been accumulated over a predefined period of time, such as a calendar month, bills which have been issued early in the cycle may be received too late to avoid charges for late payment. Further, since billing information is only made available after the completion of a full billing cycle, even if a particular payor would prefer to review and pay bills on an ongoing basis throughout the billing cycle, the payor must wait until after the end of the cycle to receive a single batch of bills. The payor will therefore need to allocate a large block of time after receipt of the transmitted accumulated billing information to review and pay the associated bills. Hence, the proposed system is inflexible in dealing with individual payor demands. Although the proposed system may electronically transmit the accumulated billing information to the payors, because all information is sent in a single transmission significant communications network resources will be required for each transmission if detailed billing information is to be provided to each payor.